Cavedweller

by Dorothy Allison

  “Disturbed, yeah.” Ruby beamed at Pearl appreciatively. “Old Amanda is like this century’s only Baptist Pentecostal nun. Goes around all the time in them high-neck dresses in the hottest weather, wearing them white socks and Mary Janes like she was a first-grader or something.”

  “Always praying and telling people they’re going to hell,” Pearl put in.

  “And that Dede is like so different you can’t believe it.”

  “Oh Lord!”

  Pearl put her hand over her mouth and giggled. Ruby nodded wisely. They looked at each other and then gave Cissy slow, pleased smiles.

  “Everybody says she’s done it.”

  “Uh-huh. Everybody.”

  Cissy frowned in confusion. “Done what?’

  “It. It. Sex.” Pearl was bouncing on Ruby’s bed.

  “She an’t no virgin, you can be sure,” Ruby said. “And her going off to Holiness Redeemer with her sister and grandma every Sunday. Lord should strike her dead. What is she, twelve?”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “She sneaks out of her grandma’s place and goes driving with boys. Everybody knows.” Ruby’s voice was adamant, her smile enormous.

  Cissy crossed her ankles on the mattress and put her hands behind her neck. “Well, it’s nothing to me.” She closed her eyes. “I an’t never met them and an’t looking to meet them.”

  “Oh, you’ll meet them.” Ruby kicked at the side of the bed once, inspecting the room as if she wanted something else to kick. “Like I said, they’re sure looking for you.”

  Cissy kept her eyes closed. She didn’t want to give Ruby the satisfaction of seeing that her words were having any effect. The truth was that Cissy did dream about Amanda and Dede, did watch for them. The truth was that she had already run into Dede. And she had Ruby and Pearl to thank for that too.

  Every Saturday afternoon for the last month, Cissy had been going downtown to Crane’s, the paperback resale shop, to trade in the books she was steadily pilfering from the twins. Their books were the only things they had that Cissy envied. She had left most of her own books behind in Venice Beach, and the few that Delia let her bring had been stolen. It was a simple matter to run her fingers along their careful stacks and pull a couple out now and then to tuck in a paper bag and hide in the trunk of the Datsun. Crane’s had an inexhaustible need for the books the twins collected, the kinds of books Cissy thought contemptible.

  M.T. and her girls shared a common passion, Regency novels full of tightly laced bodices, medieval tales of saints and courtesans, historical melodramas about Roman soldiers bedeviled by women who wielded trefoil daggers and called on the goddess to defend their lives, generational sagas of British aristocrats who chose badly in love or of serving girls who married up and made their children rich. There were boxes of books under every bed, romances of every kind. Pearl and Ruby were not of this world, and their taste in paperback fiction proved it. Cissy found the more contemporary romances—nurses with doctors, secretaries with gentlemen—only under M.T.’s bed. She never touched those, but it gratified her to take one of Pearl’s beloved sixteenth-century Gothics, or one of Ruby’s endless series set in the eighteenth-century Court of St. James, and exchange it for one of Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea fantasies. A world in which terrible curses could be cast on the wicked had a ready appeal for Cissy.

  One Saturday Cissy was hovering over the trays picking through the thrillers and science fiction. Just as she reached for a prize copy of Vonda McIntyre’s Dreamsnake, another hand closed over the spine, and she looked up to see a skinny blond girl looking back at her. They stood there, motionless, until Mrs. Crane dropped a stack of books and their heads turned together. Red-faced and shaking, Mrs. Crane bent to pick up the books without taking her eyes off the girls. Each of them frowned in the same way and looked again at the other, and each pulled back her hand.

  Why hadn’t Cissy said something? But what could she have said? Dede had looked like any other raw-faced teenage girl, blond hair pinned back, blue eyes piercing and cool. What bothered Cissy later was that her half sister looked so ordinary, that there was no aura of mystery about her, no electrical shock when they touched. In any book the twins owned, there would have been an ominous scent in the room, a flash of sisterly recognition. Cissy stood there wondering what to do. Were they supposed to speak? Dede took the book in hand and added it to the other she was holding, a dog-eared copy of Eudora Welty’s The Optimist’s Daughter. Her eyes went to Mrs. Crane, then dropped back to the bin of books. She moved down the aisle, not looking at Cissy again. Cissy put down the two books she had selected and left the shop without a word. When she got home, she went straight to M.T.’s makeup mirror to see if there really was a resemblance, if any stranger could tell at a glance that she and Dede were related. Despite her dark red hair and hazel eyes, she saw in the mirror what anyone else would see—that both of them looked like Delia, with her nose, her chin, and the same fine arched brows above clear eyes.

  The immediate difference between them was that Dede was pretty. For the first time Cissy wondered what she would look like when she got older. Back in Venice Beach, Rosemary had once showed Cissy how she did her makeup, pointing out that they both had the same heart-shaped face. “Better than those square-faced ugly women,” she laughed. “Makeup can only do so much. You wait. With that face, you’ll be pretty as your mama.”

  Cissy had paid no attention. But gazing into the mirror with the memory of Dede’s features still imprinted on her own, Cissy saw what pretty looked like. What she could not puzzle out was the other thing she had seen in that face. Dede had looked at her with curiosity, not hatred. Her face had been neutral, cool, and distant, not hostile. That face that was Cissy’s face had been almost as unreadable as her own.

  The river house was a furnished cinder-block structure with two bedrooms and a living room only slightly larger than the kitchen that opened out of it. The bathroom was a rathole squeezed between the bedrooms, a dark, smelly cubicle with a mildew-stained shower, one of those cheap plastic inserts, and one window covered with orange paint.

  Over a June weekend, M.T. and Sally tackled the house in earnest and got most of it ready in short order. It was the bathroom that stymied them. They sprayed bug killer everywhere, let it sit a few days, and scrubbed down the floors and walls with bleach twice, airing the room out between cleanings. It still reeked.

  The next Saturday, Sally stepped in, took a deep breath, and pronounced, “Crap!” She climbed up on the toilet, drew back her leg, and with two well-placed kicks knocked the window out of its frame. Light and air poured in, and a small army of roaches poured out. Sally nodded and called in her crew from Dust Bunnies, the cleaning service she ran. They pulled the rug out of the living room and burned it out back. Then they sealed all the windows with plastic and set off industrial-strength bug bombs. Two days later they took all the furniture out and scoured the place while Sally’s husband put a new window in the bathroom. Using paint left over from various jobs, Sally and her crew redid the walls in the bathroom and kitchen and touched up the bedrooms. When they were done, they put the furniture back in and laid down a rug M.T. had provided in the living room.

  M.T. drove Delia and Cissy over the next day with their few things and some new curtains, a bright yellow one for the bathroom. While M.T. told them how Sally had kicked out the bathroom window, Cissy nodded balefully and walked around the kitchen feeling the linoleum buckle under her shoes, wishing Sally had kicked out all the windows. She would rather camp under the stars than live in this horrible house, so ugly compared to the cottage in California. But Delia sat right down at the kitchen table and wept at how clean and bright everything was.

  Sally offered Delia work with Dust Bunnies, and Delia took it gratefully. It was night work, and she didn’t have to speak to a soul to do it. Every evening she went out in the same T-shirt and jeans to clean offices in Cayro’s claim to an industrial park, and came home before dawn with her hair pulling loose
from the rubber band at the back of her neck. She would sit at the kitchen table with her blank face until Cissy got up, then make the only breakfast either of them could stand, apple butter on untoasted bread. When Cissy went off to her room to read, Delia would put her head on the table and cry for an hour or so before she went to bed to sleep till late afternoon.

  “Crying season,” Cissy called it when M.T. asked her how they were doing. Some days Cissy envied Delia her free-flowing tears. Some days she hated her for them. Cissy’s tears had dried up after that one outburst at M.T.’s.

  Cissy passed her eleventh birthday at the river house, immersed in a biography of Elizabeth I that Pearl had grudgingly given her. When M.T. was moving them in, she had asked the girls to give Cissy some of their old books as a housewarming present. When the two went through their prized collections and complained loudly that their favorites were missing, M.T. caught the smirk that flickered across Cissy’s face and quickly declared that she had borrowed them herself and loaned them to some of the ladies from the church.

  “I’m sorry, baby,” she told Ruby. “We’ll see if we can’t get you some new copies, replace your favorites.” At her insistence, Ruby and Pearl picked out the most battered and boring titles they had, and M.T. cadged a couple of cartons of used books from friends.

  “Delia’s girl’s a reader,” she told people, “and you know Delia an’t got a dime to her name.” No one believed her—all Cayro thought Delia was rock-star rich—but they were willing to part with some worn paperbacks, a couple of King James Bibles, and a shelf’s worth of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. That was fine with Cissy. Taylor Caldwell and A. J. Cronin weren’t bad, and as for the rest, they were worth their weight in trade-ins for Kate Wilhelm and anything at all by James Tiptree. Cissy would never admit that she had read Ruby and Pearl’s books before she took them to Crane‘s, but she spent most of crying season away in her head, talking Regency French and swishing her skirt, or Creole patois and fingering a knife. Now and then she made cat’s-cradle designs with her fingers and tried hard to believe in the power of a curse.

  Late one Sunday afternoon when M.T. was helping Cissy fix up her room, Stephanie Pruitt showed up with a big basket of vegetables from her garden. “I haven’t seen you since you got married right after we graduated,” she cried out, and hugged Delia like it had been ten weeks instead of more than a decade.

  Steph asked Cissy for something to drink, “some tea if you got it, sugar,” and settled down at the kitchen table to tell Delia all the gossip, ignoring M.T.’s warning looks. First on her list was Clint Windsor.

  “Man has never looked well since you left,” Stephanie said, smiling as though it pleased her to say so. “There’s a lesson in that, you can bet your life. A lot of people blamed Clint for how you had to take off, you know. Everybody knew he was just like his daddy, only crazier.”

  M.T. leaned over and put a hand on Delia’s arm. “Don’t start worrying yourself now. Wasn’t nothing you or no one could have done.”

  “That family’s been stiff and mean forever,” Stephanie went on. “Old man Windsor, holier-than-thou Louise, they knew what was going on, and what did they do, huh?”

  M.T. squeezed Delia’s arm again. “Steph’s right, honey. You remember what Clint was like. He didn’t change. Lord, none of us could keep up with Clint after you left. Everybody knew he was drinking, working out at the Firestone place and drinking himself into the ground.”

  “Yeah,” Steph said. “Got all skinny and rangy like an old man, gray-faced and drunk all the time. I heard he was sleeping on the porch at your old house, showering in the backyard, not using the inside at all. Probably wasn’t no room with all them empty whiskey bottles stacked up in there.” She beamed at Cissy.

  “Drinking men, they like to live alone, all lazy, messy, and evil-hearted, full of hatred for everything an’t drunk or dead.”

  M.T. tried a grin. “Lord, yes, crazy drinking men. Only wise thing Clint did was keep it at home. It’s good that the girls were with Grandma Windsor, Delia. She took care of them better than he ever would have.”

  Delia sat up and looked at M.T. as though she had just woken from a trance.

  “I thought Clint had Mama Windsor come live with him,” she said. Randall had hired an Atlanta lawyer. There had been investigations, reports, an official notice of abandonment, and rude letters from the county social services people. Old man Windsor had judges in his pocket and righteousness on his side. Nothing Delia and Randall did made any difference. But through the whole struggle Delia had always thought of the girls in their house, the old tract house on Terrill Road that she and Clint had fixed up together. As much as she disliked old lady Windsor, she had been comforted by the thought of her girls in that kitchen eating meals on those carnival-colored plates Delia chose when she and Clint first married. It was a fantasy, Delia realized now. It was all a dream she had created to ease her fear. All that time her girls had been with Grandma Windsor, out at that farm where Clint swore even the ground was dry and sad. Delia put her palms flat across her eyes.

  “Way Clint was, old Louise probably saved your girls, honey,” Steph continued blithely. “They’re doing just fine, good-looking as you ever were, towheaded and smart. That Dede is your spitting image. An’t that right, M.T.?”

  Delia looked over at M.T. Her mouth opened and closed several times as if she wanted to speak but could not. Steph did not notice. “Well, I’ve got to get back. Did you hear I got a settlement from the fire we had? Got us a great set-up now, two trailers side by side, and a big old screened-in porch. You got to come see the place sometime.” She drained the glass of tea, then set it down and wiped her upper lip.

  Delia rose from her chair without a word and walked straight back to her bedroom. M.T. stared after her, her frown a match for Delia’s stricken face.

  “Well, Lord!” Stephanie stared blankly at M.T. and Cissy. “Was it something I said? Was it the girls? Lord knows she should be over that by now. How long has it been? Lord, must be at least ten years.”

  All through crying season M.T. used her hard-won capital for Delia. All the sympathy and understanding that came her way for how Paul had cheated on her and how she had stood up to him—all that she directed at her oldest, dearest friend.

  Most of Cayro felt that Delia’s condition when she came home— the empty grief that burned on her face, the months she spent working on Sally’s cleaning crew—was penance for a woman who had abandoned her girls. Opinion had not shifted enough in Cayro to forgive or understand the sin, not enough to consider that a woman in danger might have lost her girls running from a man who would have surely strangled her in Parlour’s Creek if he had caught her before she climbed on Randall’s bus. No, Cayro still believed Delia a sinner, and crying season was a penance they understood. They liked to see it, Delia with her mouth soft and her eyes sore at the corners.

  M.T.’s smartest move was to drag the unresisting Delia to Cayro Baptist Tabernacle week after week. Every Sunday, Delia sat on that hardwood pew, sallow and pale, eyes vacant, hands raw and swollen from scrubbing floors and swooshing toilets.

  “God surely keeps track, don’t he?” Reverend Myles said to M.T. the first Sunday. M.T. linked her arm with Delia’s and gave one careful acknowledging nod. She knew what she was doing.

  On the tenth Sunday, Mrs. Pearlman put one hand on Delia’s shoulder as she pushed herself painfully up the aisle. It was an accolade. No matter arthritis, hip replacement surgery, or pain past comprehending, Marcia Pearlman would never have touched the sinner without proof of repentance. It was a promise of forgiveness, if not actual forgiveness as yet. In the way of things, women screwed up just as men did, but women’s sins were paid for by children and women friends. The debt had a ready and simple dimension. The woman who had run off and fallen into the good life could never be forgiven, but the woman who came back ruined and wounded, painfully sober and stubbornly enduring, the woman who suffered publicly and hard—that woman had a chanc
e. That woman could be brought back into the circle.

  Suffer a little more, girl, Marcia Pearlman’s hand said, we understand this. It was fortunate that Delia was beyond understanding. Her pride could not have survived that touch. The Delia of Mud Dog would never have stood it. The Delia who had fought and fled Clint would never have endured it. Only the Delia of crying season could sit, head down, and never notice when the hand of God reached toward her. Not forgiven but understood. Not forgiven but enjoyed. Oh, the simple pleasure in seeing her like that. No woman in the congregation would speak it, but all knew. Look at her now, Lord. Look at her now. Marcia Pearlman’s hand on Delia said more than all M.T.’s whispered justifying on the steps outside.

  M.T. was a rock for Delia in those first months back in Cayro, proving her friendship by a hundred good works. There were times when Delia would not speak to her, but M.T. refused to take offense. She would check in with Cissy every few days, asking only, “How you doing?” It was a code.

  “We’re fine,” Cissy would say, and M.T. understood that Delia was not better.

  “That’s good, honey. Just give her time. It takes what it takes.”

  Every day in Cayro took Delia back to her adolescence. She sank into herself and became again the wild girl no one dared approach. The odor of her own rank body never registered. The pitying looks she drew from the other women on Sally’s crew passed her by. Delia had no energy to think about anything but moving one foot in front of the other. She wore the same loose T-shirt and cutoff jeans over and over, pulled them off and put them on again until Cissy switched them for clean ones. If she could have, Cissy thought, Delia would have showered in them and gone to bed wet.

  Safe. What Delia needed was to be safe. Who would touch her in those clothes, her skinny, stooped body leaving its imprint in the shape of the worn cotton and faded denim? Who would speak to her, look at her, hair pulled back and face bare? Who was this woman? Not Delia Byrd. Leave this one alone, her look said.